No evidence grammars are better schools

Sorry Mr Chapman but your credentials to speak on education seem to be suffering from the contemporary phenomenon of Presentism, ie: the discrediting of the past (letters, April 29). Presentism incites people to ignore, or even despise their past.

It encourages a sense of moral complacency and selfcongratulation, particularly in education.

The bias against grammar schools is ill founded and wrong. When grammar schools were universal, they were not biased in favour of the middle class but reflected the areas in which they were based. I’m an ex-grammarian from inner North West London. The majority of students there were either working class or at the most, the bottom rung of the middle classes, not solidly middle class as you have suggested. After the grammar schools were all but destroyed, those who truly cared about the childrens’ education chased the places that remained available, and that was mainly made up of the middle classes: So, a self-fulfilled prophesy brought about by those who did away with them

As for demeaning their teaching skills, can I say we had probably no more than one poor teacher. The vast majority of staff made a great impact on me that has taken me through my life.

Your comparison of the worst in grammar schools and the best in secondaries is an irrelevance, caused by the current obsession with not doing anything that might make the kids feel like ‘failures’. When I went to grammar school, I was one of 10 -15%. Most of my chums went through the secondaries. None of them felt like failures or inferior to me, and most of them achieved good positions in life. They did this through on-the-job training and apprenticeships, without having to incur debts of up to £50k obtaining unnecessary and valueless degrees, as is often the case now.

Bob Holder

■ A tripartite system of statefunded secondary education was established by the 1944 Education Act. Academic pupils would attend grammar schools, technical pupils would attend technical schools, practical pupils would attend secondary modern schools. However, very few technical schools (an omission that we ruefully reflect

on now) were built and in most areas of the country there was really a two-tier system,

The choice of 11, as an age where differential decision about the nature of types of appropriate education, seems to most child development psychologist as being fairly poorly substantiated. Similarly, the construction of the 11+ Test (now The Kent

Test), relies on questionable psychometric assumptions.

My personal journey takes me through being told in a report at primary that I would never be ‘top of the class’.

I failed 11+ and went on to be a deputy headteacher and educational psychologist.

My point to Mr Bullen is: Where is the evidence of this supposed wonderful grammar school education?

From a personal and professional perspective, I just don’t see it. I did fail my 11+ but got four degrees!

Dr Alan Bailey

B.Ed (Hons); M.A; M.Sc.; D.Ed.Psych